One of the most difficult things to do when you set up a new website is to choose the proper name for it. And this should be something that you consider carefully when you set up your own website.
There are two main considerations when setting up a new website and choosing the name:
- You can choose a website name based on branding.
- You can choose a website name based on keyword research.
Branding
Branding is a marketing strategy of making a brand name popular, so that people will get to know a company by the brand name. Everyone is familiar with some of the big brand names like Kleenex, Google, Coke, and Pampers. In many parts of the world, people don’t even use the generic word for these products, they just use the brand name, even when they don’t necessarily want that brand. This is the ultimate in branding.
For a small company, chances are that you will never become a household name like Coke, but you may become known in your niche or local area, depending on your business. This does take time, and marketing, and promotion. To give you an example of branding in a website name, you can look at my gallery website Lake Erie Artists Gallery. This site is named after a brand, due to the fact that we had a company before we had a website.
Keyword Research
If your main purpose is to sell a product or service online, and you want to be found through search engines, then you should choose a name by doing some keyword research. In this example, you would research the terms that are used for your topic, then choose a name that people would find through search. One example that I can give for that is a website that I have called Best Halloween Store. This name was chosen because I decided that “halloween store” was a good search term for this website project. When I set up this project, I knew that I would not have a lot of time to promote it before Halloween this year. I chose some static pages, and wrote a few posts, and have not had the time to develop it the way it should be done. However, the traffic that I am getting is pretty good, and that is because of the keyword research that I did. Most likely when I spend some dedicated time on this site over the next year, it will improve a lot more for next Halloween.
Once you have chosen your name, then you can still use keyword research for page names, post names, sub headings and categories, so branding doesn’t mean that you cannot reap the rewards of good keyword research. You have to decide how important it is that people remember the name of your site, or just what you carry.
About Paula Atwell
Just finished up first stages of a new blog. While I’m waiting on some graphics, I’m doing keyword research for first 30 days of articles. Most organized I’ve ever been. Hope someone will read it
I am working with a friend right now on a new website. I have begun the keyword research for the name but considered the branding path as well since it is a heavily competitive niche. I keep going back and forth.
Most all the keywords are high competition now matter the order — I’m running out of combinations to try. Branding a new site will be hard too. 6 or one — half a dozen of another in this case.
Back to the drawing board!
That does sound a bit tricky. I think that most niches can successfully researched for keywords that not too many people are using, but it is true that some are much more competitive than others. In the end, sometimes you have to give up a niche if it is impossible to rank for it.
Sometimes we get so entrenched with the way we think we would search for something on the net, that we get stuck. If this happens, it sometimes helps to ask others how they may search for the same product.
Even with well known brands or products you may find people actually searching for the wrong name. This happened to me last year – my best selling page ever is ranking at #1 on Google for “Wii Draw” (or it was last time I looked), which is the phrase that thousands of people are using to search for it each month.
However, the correct name for the product is “Wii UDraw”.
That is an excellent point, and one that can be taken even further because we always speak or think in a manner consistent with the area we live in or were raised in, while people across the country and across the globe used different words for the same thing.
When I first started up my website, I didn’t know anything about the ways of the internet at all. So, my choice of name for my site could have been a lot better. However, I’m also aware that it is a totally unique name. If you know enough about writing etc. then you’ll know what the name is about. I just wondering if that is its downfall with regards to poor traffic figures.
Welcome Carrie.
I would say in most cases, that would NOT be the case, with the assumption in place that all other factors are equal. If the posts are keyword rich, with good keyword research, and the topic is one that people search for, that would be the driving factor. The other main factor is where the site is listed in search engines for your keywords and getting them to the top. (Topic for another day.)
One of the advantages of doing keyword research to name a site is that it will also give you an idea of other keywords you can use for categories and post headings.
They will also act as write prompts for specific posts.
You can set your permalinks so that each post will also feature the topic and you will have some very strong optimized permalinks.
I will cover this in a series of posts about keyword research, but you can see the keyowrds we use on this site if you look at the URLs for each post.
That is true, although sometimes you have the brand first, so need to do the keyword research for the topics, and pages, etc. afterward.